File-based Workflows of everyday content dominates media operations worldwide. What about the hundreds of thousands of hours of existing content that most facilities have stored away on VTR tapes? Aveco has the answer.
Recovery of a video tape archive is expensive and labor intensive if not accomplished properly. Tapes are deteriorating and the sooner conversion is started the higher the probability content can be preserved. To make the workflow streamlined and cost effective, ASTRA Ingest automates the whole digitization process.
Features
- Migrates metadata from the current vidoe tape database, if any
- Automatically records all content on an analog tape
- Identifies areas where the quality of the recording is suspect for further investigation
- Enables the user to enter key metadata about the content
- Breaks in content can be treated as individual files or stitched together as one file
- Restripes timecode for each file
- Generates a low-res proxy
- Integrates with video tape robotics cart machines and LTO archival robotics machines
Metadata migration
VTR archive may be catalogued in various historic ways, such as spreadsheets, barcodes, as well as various databases. We migrate all the available metadata to the ASTRA database and standardize the metadata structure.
Priority driven ingest
All tapes shall be digitized, but some are needed sooner than the others. ASTRA integrates with traffic systems and workflow control systems to identify media required in the near-future and digitizes those with priority.
Tape analysis
Each tape is verified by partner-company analytics or a manual operator to monitor and validate timecodes as check the quality of the recorded signal. The signal processing equipment helps to optimize the output and to normalize and re-shuffle the audio tracks as required by the house standard.ASTRA stores the settings of the signal processor in its database for standardized use during ingest.
Ingest
Tapes are inserted into a cart machine. ASTRA then automatically digitizes all media from tapes to central storage. To optimize the process multiple cart machines and large pools of ingest ports can be used. For each individual ingest, ASTRA sets up the signal processor properly. A subsequent workflow can apply automatically, such as stitching movie segments from multiple tapes together as a single clip.
Quality Control
The QC is an integral part of a fully customer defined workflow and consists of several steps. During ingest ASTRA listens to the VTR error messages and stores the timecodes and error descriptions in the database. The next step is file-based QC by 3rd party QC software packages, fully integrated into ASTRA Ingest. Those assets that fail are handed over to manual quality control and manual postprocessing.
Publishing
Assets which pass the QC are published in the ASTRA database and the information is passed on to all relevant 3rd party systems. Proxy files are generated for low resolution browsing. ASTRA can archive assets to an integrated LTO archive, as well as export it to various destinations in various file formats.
File formats
ASTRA is format independent. The assets can be digitized by using any compression standard, starting from lossless native formats, to JPEG 2000 and to all MPEG formats; any media wrapper can be used, including .mxf, .dnx etc.